Man, I guess this is a good thing for Boone County Missouri’s taxpayers, and the winner’s ego, but still. Athlete storms logo contest: Hunter Allen wins Stormwater Management logo contest, and $100.

I’m not sure you can get any lower than this. Google exploits child labor with logo contests on their “doodle 4 google” contest.

Welcome to Doodle 4 Google, a competition where we invite K-12 students to play around with our homepage logo and see what new designs they come up with. This year we’re inviting U.S. kids to join in the doodling fun, around the intriguing theme “What I Wish for the World.”

They make it seem so happy, so nice, so … free. And free is what it is: Free child labor. Stay classy, Google, stay classy.

Are there more logo contests during a recession? From my sporadic searches for logo contest on Google News, well, the answer is: yes.

I’m a member of the Online News Association. I pay my dues. But, man, is the ONA one cheap bastard. Every year they ask online journalists to pony up and spend time designing a logo for them, for free, with no guarantee that anything will ever come from it. That’s devotion, right? Riiiiiiiight.

Not only that, they list some of the past winning logos in this year’s call for entries … and they forget to mention who designed the winning logo. Yes, that’s the thanks you will get. If you win, you get free admission to the ONA conference, and after the conference you will never be mentioned again.

From their website, this is how you enter:

Send your 7.125” wide by 1.125” tall, 300 dpi submissions to Danny Dougherty at ONA09logo@journalists.org with the subject “ONA Conference Logo” and you’re in! Please keep in mind that we may ask the winning artist to edit his/her design as the conference planning process continues. Acceptable file formats include PDF, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Gif, JPEG, PNG, Tiff, EPS, Freehand, SVG or as a static SWF.

Deadline is Monday, Feb. 9, at 5 p.m. ET.

This seems to be a trend with newspapers: run news about the winner of a logo contest and fail to include an image of the winning logo. “Tell, don’t show” is the rule here. Then again, this article appears with the byline “Reader-Submitted News,” which means this is all a reader’s fault. Hmmmm. Here’s the article, anyway: Monsignor Donovan student from Jackson wins diocesan logo contest.

This is the first of an occasional series on the Logo Contest blog: The Logo Question of the Quarter.

This quarter’s question goes to the professional designers out there: What would it take for you to participate in a logo contest?

The Delaware County, Indiana, airport took an interesting approach with the logo contest it held. Instead of blindly asking designers to provide their work for free, they pitched the contest to local college design professors, who then assigned it to their students as homework.

From the Ball State Daily News:

According to a press release, senior Visual Communications major Samantha McIntire won the design contest for the airport out of a pool of 165 entries.

McIntire was awarded with the $500 contest prize at the Airport Authority Board meeting Tuesday.

According to the press release, the contest had designs from students of Ball State and Ivy Tech Community College and Ball State professors assigned the project as an assignment.

Yesterday, the Northwestern, of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, wrote and published an article headlined Pickett woman wins Omro logo contest. I’m not linking to this article because it fails. It’s about a womain who won a logo contest. It reads:

A Pickett woman’s entry in the town of Omro’s logo contest was chosen by town residents to appear on the town’s recently launched Web site.

Nowhere in this article does it show the logo that won, or link to the town’s web site. This is a fail. More an online journalism fail than a logo contest fail, but, still, a fail.

If there’s a logo contest you have that we should cover, share it in the comments below.

This is a blog where new logo contests, shameful logo contests, and exciting logo contests will be linked to, maybe discussed, possibly celebrated, and definitely written about.